Thomas Frederic Cheeseman

Thomas Frederick Cheeseman (8 June 184515 October 1923) was a New Zealand botanist. He was also a naturalist who had wide-ranging interests, such that he even described a few species of sea slugs (marine gastropod molluscs).

Biography Cheeseman was born at Hull, in Yorkshire on 8 June 1845, the eldest of five children. He came to New Zealand at the age of eight with his parents on the Artemesia, arriving in Auckland on 4 April 1854. He was educated at Parnell Grammar School and then at St John's College, Auckland. His father, the Rev. Thomas Cheeseman, had been a member of the old Auckland Provincial Council. His two other sisters, Ellen, a watercolour painter and botanist, and Clara, a novelist, also accompanied him on field trips.

Cheeseman married Rosetta Keesing , of a notable Jewish family of Auckland city, in November 1889. In 1914 he, Hemsley, and Matilda Smith created Illustrations of the New Zealand Flora (1914). In some of his publications, Cheeseman speculated as to the possible origins of the New Zealand sub-Antarctic flora. He also had written an early paper on the naturalised plants of the Auckland Provincial District. Some of his early papers were about the pollination of certain species.

Membership Cheeseman was a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (FLS), and the Zoological Society (FZS). He was made a Corresponding Membership of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, and awarded the Gold Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society, the botanical equivalent to a Nobel Medal, in 1923.

He served as the President of the New Zealand Institute from 1911 to 1913. In 1918, he was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal and Prize, and in 1919 he was made an original Fellow of the New Zealand Institute .